Biographia Literaria PDF book preview edition

0
Biographia
Literaria
By
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
This eBook is designed, edited and published by PDFBooksWorld and can be accessed & downloaded
for personal reading by registered members of PDFBooksWorld at http://www.pdfbooksworld.com.
Though the text, illustrations and images used in this book are out of copyright, this unique PDF formatted
edition is copyrighted. Readers of this book can share and link to pages of our website through blogs and
social networks, however the PDF files downloaded from our website shall not be stored or transmitted in
any form for commercial purpose.
Disclaimer: This edition is an electronic version of a public domain book, which was originally written many decades ago. Hence
contents found in this eBook may not be relevant to the contemporary scenarios. This book shall be read for informative and
educational purpose only. This eBook is provided ‘AS-IS’ with no other warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not
limited to warranties of merchantability or fitness for any purpose.
1
Contents
Biographia Literaria ............................................................... 1
Contents .................................................................................... 2
CHAPTERS SUMMARY .............................................................. 3
CHAPTER I .................................................................................10
CHAPTER II............................................................................... 26
CHAPTER III ............................................................................. 38
CHAPTER IV............................................................................... 51
2
CHAPTERS SUMMARY
CHAP.
I Motives to the present work—Reception of the Author's first
publication—Discipline of his taste at school—Effect of
contemporary
Sonnets—
writers
on
youthful
minds—Bowles's
Comparison between the poets before and since
II Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of
facts—Causes and occasions of the charge—Its injustice
III The Author's obligations to Critics, and the probable
occasion—Principles of modern criticism—Mr. Southey's
works and character
IV The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface—Mr. Wordsworth's
earlier
investigation
poems—On
Fancy
and
Imagination—The
of the distinction important to the Fine Arts
3
V On the law of Association—Its history traced from Aristotle
to Hartley
VI That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of
Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded
in facts
VII Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory—Of
the original mistake or equivocation which procured its
admission—Memoria technica
VIII The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes—Refined
first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the
doctrine
Materialism
of
Harmonia
praestabilita—Hylozoism—
—None of these systems, or any possible theory of
Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable
XI Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
4
conditions?—Giordano Bruno—Literary Aristocracy, or the
existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a
privileged order—The Author's obligations to the MysticsTo Immanuel Kant—The difference between the letter and
The spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of
Prudence in the teaching of Philosophy—Fichte's attempt
to complete the Critical system-Its partial success and
ultimate failure—Obligations to Schelling; and among
English writers to Saumarez
X A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude
preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination
or Plastic Power—On Pedantry and pedantic expressions—
Advice to young authors respecting publication—Various
anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress
of his opinions in Religion and Politics
XI An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel
themselves disposed to become authors
5
XII A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the
perusal
or omission of the chapter that follows
XIII On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power
XIV Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
proposed—Preface to the second edition—The ensuing
controversy, its causes and acrimony—Philosophic
definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia
XV The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a
Critical analysis of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and
Rape of Lucrece
XVI Striking points of difference between the Poets of the
present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries—Wish expressed for the union of the
characteristic merits of both
XVII Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth—
6
Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially
unfavourable to the formation of a human diction-The
best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of
clowns or shepherds—Poetry essentially ideal and generic—
The language of Milton as much the language of real life,
yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager
XVIII Language of metrical composition, why and wherein
essentially
different from that of prose—Origin and elements of metre
—Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby
imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction
XIX Continuation—Concerning the real object, which, it is
probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical
preface—Elucidation and application of this
XX The former subject continued—The neutral style, or that
common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from
Chaucer, Herbert, and others
7
XXI Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical
journals
XXII The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with
the
principles from which the judgment, that they are defects,
is deduced—Their proportion to the beauties—For the
greatest part characteristic of his theory only
SATYRANE'S LETTERS
XXIII Critique on Bertram
XXIV Conclusion
So wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so
wuenscht er doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich
gleichgesinnt weis, (oder hofft,) deren Anzahl aber in der Breite
der Welt zerstreut ist; er wuenscht sein Verhaeltniss zu den
aeltesten Freunden dadurch wieder anzuknuepfen, mit neuen es
fortzusetzen, und in der letzten Generation sich wieder andere fur
seine uebrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er wuenscht der Jugend
8
die Umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst verirrte.
(Goethe. Einleitung in die Propylaeen.)
TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he
wishes nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either
knows or hopes to be of like mind with himself, but who are
widely scattered in the world: he wishes to knit anew his
connections with his oldest friends, to continue those recently
formed, and to win other friends among the rising generation for
the remaining course of his life. He wishes to spare the young
those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his way.
9
CHAPTER I
Motives to the present work—Reception of the Author's first
publication—Discipline of his taste at school—Effect of
contemporary writers on youthful minds—Bowles's Sonnets—
Comparison between the poets before and since Pope.
It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in
conversation, and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to
explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and
limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance,
in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world.
Most often it has been connected with some charge which I could
not acknowledge, or some principle which I had never
entertained. Nevertheless, had I had no other motive or
incitement, the reader would not have been troubled with this
exculpation. What my additional purposes were, will be seen in
the following pages. It will be found, that the least of what I have
written concerns myself personally. I have used the narration
chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part
for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by
particular events, but still more as introductory to a statement of
my principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and an
application of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to
poetry and criticism. But of the objects, which I proposed to
myself, it was not the least important to effect, as far as possible, a
settlement of the long continued controversy concerning the true
nature of poetic diction; and at the same time to define with the
utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the poet, by whose
writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since
fuelled and fanned.
10
In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of
manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems. They
were received with a degree of favour, which, young as I was, I
well know was bestowed on them not so much for any positive
merit, as because they were considered buds of hope, and
promises of better works to come. The critics of that day, the most
flattering, equally with the severest, concurred in objecting to
them obscurity, a general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of
new coined double epithets [1]. The first is the fault which a writer
is the least able to detect in his own compositions: and my mind
was not then sufficiently disciplined to receive the authority of
others, as a substitute for my own conviction. Satisfied that the
thoughts, such as they were, could not have been expressed
otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot to inquire,
whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree of
attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This
remark however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the
Religious Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its
full extent, and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my
private and public censors for their friendly admonitions. In the
after editions, I pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand,
and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of
thought and diction; though in truth, these parasite plants of
youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into my longer poems
with such intricacy of union, that I was often obliged to omit
disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower.
From that period to the date of the present work I have published
nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come
before the board of anonymous criticism. Even the three or four
poems, printed with the works of a friend [2], as far as they were
censured at all, were charged with the same or similar defects,
11
(though I am persuaded not with equal justice),—with an excess of
ornament, in addition to strained and elaborate diction. I must be
permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my juvenile
poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer and
more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present
possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of
realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed
partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving
a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a
new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise,
originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.—
During several years of my youth and early manhood, I
reverenced those who had re-introduced the manly simplicity of
the Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as
made the hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the
same style. Perhaps a similar process has happened to others; but
my earliest poems were marked by an ease and simplicity, which I
have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to impress on my
later compositions.
At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable
advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very
severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my
taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and
Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me
to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence,
and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the
Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with
even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense
and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former
in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At
12
the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he
made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were
the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up,
so as to escape his censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even
that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a
logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult,
because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and
more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there
is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the
position of every word; and I well remember that, availing himself
of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt
to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the
same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the
word in the original text.
In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three
years of our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase,
metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the
same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and
dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses,
and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an
abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now,
exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean!
Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian
spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain
introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a
list of interdiction. Among the similes, there was, I remember,
that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many
subjects; in which however it yielded the palm at once to the
example of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good and apt,
whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and
13
Clytus!—Flattery? Alexander and Clytus!—anger—drunkenness—
pride—friendship—ingratitude—late repentance? Still, still
Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of agriculture having
been exemplified in the sagacious observation that, had Alexander
been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend Clytus
through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend was
banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have sometimes
ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index
expurgatorius of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases,
both introductory, and transitional, including a large assortment
of modest egoisms, and flattering illeisms, and the like, might be
hung up in our Law-courts, and both Houses of Parliament, with
great advantage to the public, as an important saving of national
time, an incalculable relief to his Majesty's ministers, but above
all, as insuring the thanks of country attornies, and their clients,
who have private bills to carry through the House.
Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I
cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy
of imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under some
pretext of want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or
five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on
his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might
not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other
thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two
faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable
verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the
same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day.
The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a
man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams,
by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the
14
painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor
dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He
sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and
tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of
the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous and
conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, full of
years, and full of honours, even of those honours, which were
dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still
binding him to the interests of that school, in which he had been
himself educated, and to which during his whole life he was a
dedicated thing.
From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no
models of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid
effect on the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary
genius. The discipline, my mind had undergone, Ne falleretur
rotundo sono et versuum cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut
inspiceret quidnam subesset, quae, sedes, quod firmamentum,
quis fundus verbis; an figures essent mera ornatura et orationis
fucus; vel sanguinis e materiae ipsius corde effluentis rubor
quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina;—removed all obstacles
to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing my
delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. Bowles's
sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and
my enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem to a young man
things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must
remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains.
But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older
than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and
disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and
inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very
15
admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The poems
themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to
extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one,
who exists to receive it.
There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and
are producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of
teaching, in comparison with which we have been called on to
despise our great public schools, and universities,
in whose halls are hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old—
modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into
prodigies. And prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus
produced; prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and
infidelity! Instead of storing the memory, during the period when
the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after
exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest
models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which is the
natural and graceful temper of early youth; these nurslings of
improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide; to suspect
all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to hold nothing
sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible
arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty
passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such
dispositions alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, Neque
enim debet operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos
nunquam vidimus, floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam
imagines conquireremus, ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia
quasi satietate languescet? At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non
admirari hominem admiratione dignissimum, quia videre,
complecti, nec laudare tantum, verum etiam amare contingit.
16
I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of
Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a
quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me, by
a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University, and who,
during the whole time that he was in our first form (or in our
school language a Grecian,) had been my patron and protector. I
refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and every way excellent
Bishop of Calcutta:
qui laudibus amplis
Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terra
Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur
Dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est.
It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender
recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered
the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I
was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest
acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness
and impetuous zeal, with which I laboured to make proselytes, not
only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of
whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school finances did
not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year
and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I
could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. And with
almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following
publications of the same author.
Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well
aware, that I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it
will be well, if I subject myself to no worse charge than that of
singularity; I am not therefore deterred from avowing, that I
regard, and ever have regarded the obligations of intellect among
the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. A valuable thought, or a
17
particular train of thoughts, gives me additional pleasure, when I
can safely refer and attribute it to the conversation or
correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were
indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age,
even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in
metaphysics, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased
me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind.
Poetry—(though for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in
English versification, and had already produced two or three
compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to
my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained
me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was
at all pleased with,)—poetry itself, yea, novels and romances,
became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our leavedays [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections
in London,) highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if
he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me.
For I soon found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects
Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost.
This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to
my natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would
perhaps have been destructive, had it been continued; but from
this I was auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental
introduction to an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial
influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so
natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the
sonnets and other early poems of Mr. Bowles. Well would it have
been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental
disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the
18
harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the
unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after
time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged
sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength
and subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings
of the heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during
which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my
original tendencies to develop themselves;—my fancy, and the
love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds.
The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and
admiration of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known
to me at a somewhat later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe
bears more immediately on my present subject. Among those with
whom I conversed, there were, of course, very many who had
formed their taste, and their notions of poetry, from the writings
of Pope and his followers; or to speak more generally, in that
school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English
understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I
was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from
inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with
the general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I
doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of
youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I
saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute
observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society,
as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in
smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even
when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in
the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a
consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless
19
talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point
was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was,
as it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a
grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams.
Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not
so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the
language of poetry. On this last point, I had occasion to render my
own thoughts gradually more and more plain to myself, by
frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's Botanic Garden,
which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the
reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and
natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to
act foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally
rise from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first
Cambridge vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a
literary society in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have
compared Darwin's work to the Russian palace of ice, glittering,
cold and transitory. In the same essay too, I assigned sundry
reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison of passages in the Latin
poets with the original Greek, from which they were borrowed, for
the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray; and of the simile
in Shakespeare
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)
to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
20
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes
dearly purchased)—I preferred the original on the ground, that in
the imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or
not putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other
passages of the same poet, whether the words should be
personifications, or mere abstractions. I mention this, because, in
referring various lines in Gray to their original in Shakespeare and
Milton, and in the clear perception how completely all the
propriety was lost in the transfer, I was, at that early period, led to
a conjecture, which, many years afterwards was recalled to me
from the same thought having been started in conversation, but
far more ably, and developed more fully, by Mr. Wordsworth;—
namely, that this style of poetry, which I have characterized
above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic language, had
been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of
writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these
exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was
so general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have
forgotten his native language; yet in the present day it is not to be
supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any
other reliance on the force or fitness of his phrases, but the
authority of the writer from whom he has adopted them.
Consequently he must first prepare his thoughts, and then pick
out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more compendiously
from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to embody
them.
I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young
man from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty,
21
provided I find him always arguing on one side of the question.
The controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the
honour of a favourite contemporary, then known to me only by his
works, were of great advantage in the formation and
establishment of my taste and critical opinions. In my defence of
the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each
couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar,
neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will
remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the ragfair finery of,
———thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,—
I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek
poets, from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our
elder English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But
as it was my constant reply to authorities brought against me from
later poets of great name, that no authority could avail in
opposition to Truth, Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal
Grammar; actuated too by my former passion for metaphysical
investigations; I laboured at a solid foundation, on which
permanently to ground my opinions, in the component faculties of
the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and
importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the
pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated
the merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading
and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming
them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;—first,
that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we
return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power,
and claims the name of essential poetry;—secondly, that whatever
lines can be translated into other words of the same language,
22
without diminution of their significance, either in sense or
association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their
diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from the list of
worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in the
reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the
author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I
have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as
hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own
cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous
undercurrent of feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom
anywhere as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm,
that it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from
the Pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the
position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare, (in their most
important works at least,) without making the poet say something
else, or something worse, than he does say. One great distinction,
I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic
faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In
the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic outof-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother
English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the
most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the
passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect
and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a
perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an
amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of
abstract [5] meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the
other both heart and head to point and drapery.
The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style
of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to
23
understand and account for the effect produced on me by the
Sonnets, the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for
it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in
proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of
its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of
chaste and manly diction; but they were cold, and, if I may so
express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's there
is a stiffness, which too often gives them the appearance of
imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause
or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most
popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and
elevated style, of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles [6]
were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural
thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart
with the head.
It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my
own powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid
diction, which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of
very inferior worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to
my better judgment; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth
and twenty-fifth years—(for example, the shorter blank verse
poems, the lines, which now form the middle and conclusion of
the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy of
Remorse)—are not more below my present ideal in respect of the
general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults
were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many
who have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same
class with those of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended
to bring examples of affected simplicity from my volume, have
been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a copy of
24
verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and had
myself characterized, as sermoni propiora.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried
to an excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will
excuse me for noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu
honesto the three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the
most likely to beset a young writer. So long ago as the publication
of the second number of the Monthly Magazine, under the name
of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed three sonnets, the first
of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the
spirit of doleful egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite
phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and
licentious;—the second was on low creeping language and
thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases
of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the
indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and
imagery. The reader will find them in the note [7] below, and will I
trust regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes alone,
and not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so
decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my
style, that a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of
me in other respects with his usual kindness, to a gentleman, who
was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist
giving him a hint not to mention 'The house that Jack built' in my
presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;" he
not knowing that I was myself the author of it.
25
CHAPTER II
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of
facts—Causes and occasions of the charge—Its injustice.
I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct
consciousness, that complex feeling, with which readers in general
take part against the author, in favour of the critic; and the
readiness with which they apply to all poets the old sarcasm of
Horace upon the scribblers of his time
———genus irritabile vatum.
A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a
consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of
the senses, do, we know well, render the mind liable to
superstition and fanaticism. Having a deficient portion of internal
and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in the crowd circum
fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess singly.
Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat
and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become restless
and irritable through the increased temperature of collected
multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such at least
was its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees,
namely, schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an
inverse proportion to the insight,—that the more vivid, as this the
less distinct—anger is the inevitable consequence. The absense of
all foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet
believe both true and indispensable to their safety and happiness,
cannot but produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary
sense of fear from which nature has no means of rescuing herself
26
but by anger. Experience informs us that the first defence of weak
minds is to recriminate.
There's no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
They're both alike the ague.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power
of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections
blend more easily and intimately with these ideal creations than
with the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts,
rather than by things; and only then feels the requisite interest
even for the most important events and accidents, when by means
of meditation they have passed into thoughts. The sanity of the
mind is between superstition with fanaticism on the one hand,
and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased slowness to
action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be so
vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of
them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess
more than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and
applying the knowledge of others,)—yet still want something of
the creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this
reason therefore, they are men of commanding genius. While the
former rest content between thought and reality, as it were in an
intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the
substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form; the latter
must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order
to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree
of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These in tranquil
times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or temple, or
landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join sea with
sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows,
imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to
27
sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from
mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in
times of tumult they are the men destined to come forth as the
shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to
substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and kingdoms,
as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds [8]. The records of
biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest
genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the
accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm
and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the
inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been
either indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate
reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a
cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which makes it almost impossible to
doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself.
Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost
proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance
of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his
Sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when
he asserted, that our great bard—
———grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus.)
Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the
duration of his works with that of his personal existence,
Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
28
Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.
I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness
to praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own
equality with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise,
are alike manifested in another Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.
In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender,
delicate, and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had
almost said, effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the
unjust persecution of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which
overwhelmed his latter days. These causes have diffused over all
his compositions "a melancholy grace," and have drawn forth
occasional strains, the more pathetic from their gentleness. But no
where do we find the least trace of irritability, and still less of
quarrelsome or affected contempt of his censurers.
The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be
affirmed of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are
concerned. He reserved his anger for the enemies of religion,
freedom, and his country. My mind is not capable of forming a
more august conception, than arises from the contemplation of
29
this great man in his latter days;—poor, sick, old, blind, slandered,
persecuted,—
Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,—
in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for
whom, as by that against whom, he had contended; and among
men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the
distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if
additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of
two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
———argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
Right onward.
From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his
latter day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of
youth and hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown
to us, had they not been likewise the enemies of his country.
I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when
there exist many and excellent models, a high degree of talent,
combined with taste and judgment, and employed in works of
imagination, will acquire for a man the name of a great genius;
though even that analogon of genius, which, in certain states of
society, may even render his writings more popular than the
absolute reality could have done, would be sought for in vain in
the mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in instances
of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the
irritability, which has been attributed to the author's genius as its
cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse
pain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is
charged to the author, belongs to the man, who would probably
30
have been still more impatient, but for the humanizing influences
of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of his irritability.
How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to
this charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to
show, supported by experience? This seems to me of no very
difficult solution. In whatever country literature is widely
diffused, there will be many who mistake an intense desire to
possess the reputation of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and
original tendencies which constitute it. But men, whose dearest
wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of their own power, become
in all cases more or less impatient and prone to anger. Besides,
though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can know one
thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may
have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the
attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become himself one of his
own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion
must differ, even in the person's own feelings, from a real sense of
inward power, what can be more natural, than that this difference
should betray itself in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as
the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be often detected by
its shaking and trembling.
But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the
world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by
no means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded
complaints of injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or
entertained as matter of merriment. In the days of Chaucer and
Gower, our language might (with due allowance for the
imperfections of a simile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal
reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or Apollo could
31
construct even the rude syrinx; and from this the constructors
alone could elicit strains of music. But now, partly by the labours
of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial state of
society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it were
into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune.
Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many.
Sometimes (for it is with similes, as it is with jests at a wine table,
one is sure to suggest another) I have attempted to illustrate the
present state of our language, in its relation to literature, by a
press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the
present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic
periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary
indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not sense,
will be so like it as to do as well. Perhaps better: for it spares the
reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges
indolence; and secures the memory from all danger of an
intellectual plethora. Hence of all trades, literature at present
demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of
literature, the manufacturing of poems. The difference indeed
between these and the works of genius is not less than between an
egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike.
Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little
examination works of polite literature are commonly perused, not
only by the mass of readers, but by men of first rate ability, till
some accident or chance [10] discussion have roused their
attention, and put them on their guard. And hence individuals
below mediocrity not less in natural power than in acquired
knowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest mechanic
crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their want
of sense and sensibility; men, who being first scribblers from
32
idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and
malevolence,—have been able to drive a successful trade in the
employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into
temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that
most powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and
malignant passions of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of
scorn, envy, and all malignant propensities to require a quick
change of objects, such writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake
from their dream of vanity to disappointment and neglect with
embittered and envenomed feelings. Even during their short-lived
success, sensible in spite of themselves on what a shifting
foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal of praise as a
robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once into violent and
undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing into chronical,
the more deadly as the less violent, they become the fit
instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are
then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant
to ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and
authorized, in Andrew Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals"
to speak of themselves plurali majestatico! As if literature formed
a caste, like that of the Paras in Hindostan, who, however
maltreated, must not dare to deem themselves wronged! As if
that, which in all other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the
circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted only to make the
slanderer inviolable! [12] Thus, in part, from the accidental
tempers of individuals—(men of undoubted talent, but not men of
genius)—tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to
appear men of genius; but still more effectively by the excesses of
the mere counterfeits both of talent and genius; the number too
being so incomparably greater of those who are thought to be,
than of those who really are men of genius; and in part from the
33
natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust distinction,
made by the public itself between literary and all other property; I
believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an unusual
irascibility concerning the reception of its products as
characteristic of genius.
It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of
readers, to suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which
should be to criticise all the chief works presented to the public by
our ribbon-weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and chinamanufacturers; which should be conducted in the same spirit, and
take the same freedom with personal character, as our literary
journals. They would scarcely, I think, deny their belief, not only
that the genus irritabile would be found to include many other
species besides that of bards; but that the irritability of trade
would soon reduce the resentments of poets into mere shadowfights in the comparison. Or is wealth the only rational object of
human interest? Or even if this were admitted, has the poet no
property in his works? Or is it a rare, or culpable case, that he who
serves at the altar of the Muses, should be compelled to derive his
maintenance from the altar, when too he has perhaps deliberately
abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and opulence in order to
devote himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction
or refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we pass by all
higher objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and
even that ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch
and ornament, which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity
of human virtue,—is the character and property of the man, who
labours for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled to a share of
our fellow feeling, than that of the wine-merchant or milliner?
Sensibility indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a
34
characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component part, of
genius. But it is not less an essential mark of true genius, that its
sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than by
its own personal interests; for this plain reason, that the man of
genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still
constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings
have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the
number, clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is
always in an inverse proportion. And yet, should he perchance
have occasion to repel some false charge, or to rectify some
erroneous censure, nothing is more common than for the many to
mistake the general liveliness of his manner and language,
whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar irritation from
its accidental relation to himself. [13]
For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious
test of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any
literary testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been,
however, neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the
imperfection on genius. But an experience—(and I should not
need documents in abundance to prove my words, if I added)—a
tried experience of twenty years, has taught me, that the original
sin of my character consists in a careless indifference to public
opinion, and to the attacks of those who influence it; that praise
and admiration have become yearly less and less desirable, except
as marks of sympathy; nay that it is difficult and distressing to me
to think with any interest even about the sale and profit of my
works, important as, in my present circumstances, such
considerations must needs be. Yet it never occurred to me to
believe or fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed
on me by nature or education was in any way connected with this
35
habit of my feelings; or that it needed any other parents or
fosterers than constitutional indolence, aggravated into languor
by
ill-health;
the
accumulating
embarrassments
of
procrastination; the mental cowardice, which is the inseparable
companion of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to
think and converse on any thing rather than on what concerns
ourselves; in fine, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on
my faults or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare
for evils comparatively distant and alien.
Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under
happier stars. I cannot afford it. But so far from condemning
those who can, I deem it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to
his heart, to feel and express a resentment proportioned to the
grossness of the provocation, and the importance of the object.
There is no profession on earth, which requires an attention so
early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry; and indeed
as that of literary composition in general, if it be such as at all
satisfies the demands both of taste and of sound logic. How
difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse is,
may be conjectured from the failure of those, who have attempted
poetry late in life. Where then a man has, from his earliest youth,
devoted his whole being to an object, which by the admission of
all civilized nations in all ages is honourable as a pursuit, and
glorious as an attainment; what of all that relates to himself and
his family, if only we except his moral character, can have fairer
claims to his protection, or more authorize acts of self-defence,
than the elaborate products of his intellect and intellectual
industry? Prudence itself would command us to show, even if
defect or diversion of natural sensibility had prevented us from
feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the offspring and
36
representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by woful
experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this
wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich
oblivion. The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and
are forgotten; but yet no small number have crept forth into life,
some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and still more to
plume the shafts in the quivers of my enemies, of them that
unprovoked have lain in wait against my soul.
Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes!
37
CHAPTER III
The Author's obligations to critics, and the probable occasion—
Principles of modern criticism—Mr. Southey's works and
character.
To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals
of various name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name
in verse or prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do
seriously believe and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of
whatever reputation and publicity I happen to possess. For when
the name of an individual has occurred so frequently, in so many
works, for so great a length of time, the readers of these works—
(which with a shelf or two of beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas,
form nine-tenths of the reading of the reading Public [14])—
cannot but be familiar with the name, without distinctly
remembering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for censure.
And this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the habit of
perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroes'
catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory [15].
But where this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to
suspect that there must be something more than usually strong
and extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so
merciless and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling
of anger therefore—(for which indeed, on my own account, I have
no pretext)—I may yet be allowed to express some degree of
surprise, that, after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain
class of faults which I had, nothing having come before the
judgment-seat in the interim, I should, year after year, quarter
after quarter, month after month—(not to mention sundry petty
periodicals of still quicker revolution, "or weekly or diurnal")—
38
have been, for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged
forth by them into the foremost ranks of the proscribed, and
forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly opposite, and
which I certainly had not. How shall I explain this?
Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot
attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to
feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for with the
exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so
before they were known as authors, I have had little other
acquaintance with literary characters, than what may be implied
in an accidental introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed
company. And as far as words and looks can be trusted, I must
believe that, even in these instances, I had excited no unfriendly
disposition. Neither by letter, nor in conversation, have I ever had
dispute or controversy beyond the common social interchange of
opinions. Nay, where I had reason to suppose my convictions
fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may add, the
impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief, rather
than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could
establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds
common to both sides, from which to commence its explanation.
Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few
pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the
extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having
been popular at any time, to render probable, I had almost said
possible, the excitement of envy on their account; and the man
who should envy me on any other, verily he must be envy-mad!
Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any
animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have
before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been
39
limited and distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor
controversy. From my first entrance into life, I have, with few and
short intervals, lived either abroad or in retirement. My different
essays on subjects of national interest, published at different
times, first in the Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my
courses of Lectures on the principles of criticism as applied to
Shakespeare and Milton, constitute my whole publicity; the only
occasions on which I could offend any member of the republic of
letters. With one solitary exception in which my words were first
misstated and then wantonly applied to an individual, I could
never learn that I had excited the displeasure of any among my
literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to give a
course of Lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of
English poetry in its different aeras; first, from Chaucer to Milton;
second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and third, from
Cowper to the present day; I changed my plan, and confined my
disquisition to the former two periods, that I might furnish no
possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the
malignant to misapply my words, and having stamped their own
meaning on them, to pass them as current coin in the marts of
garrulity or detraction.
Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of
the deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon,
Harrington, Machiavel, and Spinoza, are not read, because Hume,
Condillac, and Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no
prudent man will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own
supposed department; contenting himself with praising in his
turn those whom he deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my
duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would
oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in
40
which I could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings, with
their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable
conversation, where however strong the reasons might be, the
feelings that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by
some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides I well know,
and, I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the
ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies
of critics without taste or judgment are the natural reward of
authors without feeling or genius. Sint unicuique sua praemia.
How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to
account for attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which
it would require all three to explain? The solution seems to be
this,—I was in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr.
Southey! This, however, transfers, rather than removes the
difficulty. Be it, that, by an unconscionable extension of the old
adage, noscitur a socio, my literary friends are never under the
water-fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with the spray;
yet how came the torrent to descend upon them?
First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the
general reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems
published with Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion;
the two volumes of poems under his own name, and the Joan of
Arc. The censures of the critics by profession are extant, and may
be easily referred to:—careless lines, inequality in the merit of the
different poems, and (in the lighter works) a predilection for the
strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might have been
anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently
enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting a party spirit to
aggravate the defects of a poet, who with all the courage of
uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a cause, which he
41
deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by
whatever name consecrated. But it was as little objected by others,
as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred careless and
prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that he
pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that
which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable
dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or
Strada's Prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early
study of the best models in his own language had not infused the
same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the expression,
more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced was, that in
his taste and estimation of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more
with Thomas Warton, than with Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to
deny, that at all times Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir
Philip Sidney in preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest
style of poetry to twenty indifferent poems that strutted in the
highest. And by what have his works, published since then, been
characterized, each more strikingly than the preceding, but by
greater splendour, a deeper pathos, profounder reflections, and a
more sustained dignity of language and of metre? Distant may the
period be, but whenever the time shall come, when all his works
shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, I
trust that an appendix of excerpta of all the passages, in which his
writings, name, and character have been attacked, from the
pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be
an accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after
times I dare not hope; for as long as there are readers to be
delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to
calumniate. And such readers will become in all probability more
numerous, in proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature
shall produce an increase of sciolists, and sciolism bring with it
42
petulance and presumption. In times of old, books were as
religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next became
venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of
instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank
still lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they
seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of
every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses
to write from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and
to abide the decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that
reads after dinner."
The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation
which the authors themselves have assumed towards their
readers. From the lofty address of Bacon: "these are the
meditations of Francis of Verulam, which that posterity should be
possessed of, he deemed their interest:" or from dedication to
Monarch or Pontiff, in which the honour given was asserted in
equipoise to the patronage acknowledged: from Pindar's
———'ep' alloi—
si d'alloi megaloi: to d'eschaton koryphoutai basilensi. Maeketi
paptaine porsion.
Eiae se te touton
upsou chronon patein, eme
te tossade nikaphorois
omilein, prophanton sophian kath' Ellanas eonta panta.—OLYMP. OD. I.
there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of
pretension.
Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very
number, addressed themselves to "learned readers;" then aimed
to conciliate the graces of "the candid reader;" till, the critic still
rising as the author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively
were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as the
43
Town! And now, finally, all men being supposed able to read, and
all readers able to judge, the multitudinous Public, shaped into
personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on
the throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but
echoes the decisions of its invisible ministers, whose intellectual
claims to the guardianship of the Muses seem, for the greater part,
analogous to the physical qualifications which adapt their oriental
brethren for the superintendence of the Harem. Thus it is said,
that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges, because
he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight; thus too St. Cecilia is
said to have been first propitiated by musicians, because, having
failed in her own attempts, she had taken a dislike to the art and
all its successful professors. But I shall probably have occasion
hereafter to deliver my convictions more at large concerning this
state of things, and its influences on taste, genius and morality.
In the Thalaba, the Madoc, and still more evidently in the
unique [16] Cid, in the Kehama, and, as last, so best, the Roderick;
Southey has given abundant proof, se cogitare quam sit magnum
dare aliquid in manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non
saepe tractandum quod placere et semper et omnibus cupiat. But
on the other hand, I conceive, that Mr. Southey was quite unable
to comprehend, wherein could consist the crime or mischief of
printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or to speak more
generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over,
according as the taste and humour of the reader might chance to
be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present age
periturae parcere chartae is emphatically an unreasonable
demand. The merest trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold better
claims to its ink and paper than all the silly criticisms on it, which
proved no more than that the critic was not one of those, for
44
whom the trifle was written; and than all the grave exhortations to
a greater reverence for the public—as if the passive page of a book,
by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly
assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to
flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of
the said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and
more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact,
that if in a volume of poetry the critic should find poem or passage
which he deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and
reprint it in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he wastes
as much more paper than the author, as the copies of a
fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original
book; in some, and those the most prominent instances, as ten
thousand to five hundred. I know nothing that surpasses the
vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or painter,—(not by
characteristic defects; for where there is genius, these always
point to his characteristic beauties; but)—by accidental failures or
faulty passages; except the impudence of defending it, as the
proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. Omit or pass
slightly over the expression, grace, and grouping of Raffael's
figures; but ridicule in detail the knitting-needles and broomtwigs, that are to represent trees in his back grounds; and never
let him hear the last of his galli-pots! Admit that the Allegro and
Penseroso of Milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for
this concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the
University Carrier! As a fair specimen of his Sonnets, quote
"A Book was writ of late called Tetrachordon;"
and, as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal
translation of the first and second Psalm! In order to justify
yourself, you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the
beauties and excellencies of the poet, the admiration of these
45
might seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of
their love and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems and
passages in which the poet was most unlike himself.
But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with
far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and
petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference
to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced
from the nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it
arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters,
as the guides of their taste and judgment. To the purchaser and
mere reader it is, at all events, an injustice. He who tells me that
there are defects in a new work, tells me nothing which I should
not have taken for granted without his information. But he, who
points out and elucidates the beauties of an original work does
indeed give me interesting information, such as experience would
not have authorized me in anticipating. And as to compositions
which the authors themselves announce with
Haec ipsi novimus esse nihil,
why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only
because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What
literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to
let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I
am not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent
amusement from the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and
the like, of Swift and his correspondents, in hours of languor,
when to have read his more finished works would have been
useless to myself, and, in some sort, an act of injustice to the
author. But I am at a loss to conceive by what perversity of
judgment, these relaxations of his genius could be employed to
diminish his fame as the writer of Gulliver, or the Tale of a Tub.
Had Mr. Southey written twice as many poems of inferior merit,
46
or partial interest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, they
would have added to his honour with good and wise men, not
merely or principally as proving the versatility of his talents, but
as evidences of the purity of that mind, which even in its levities
never dictated a line which it need regret on any moral account.
I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the
duty of contrasting Southey's fixed and well-earned fame, with the
abuse and indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his
early youth to his ripest manhood. But I cannot think so ill of
human nature as not to believe, that these critics have already
taken shame to themselves, whether they consider the object of
their abuse in his moral or his literary character. For reflect but on
the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands second to
no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when I
regard him as a popular essayist,—(for the articles of his
compositions in the reviews are, for the greater part, essays on
subjects of deep or curious interest rather than criticisms on
particular works)—I look in vain for any writer, who has conveyed
so much information, from so many and such recondite sources,
with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and
poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in
short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so
much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. His prose
is always intelligible and always entertaining. In poetry he has
attempted almost every species of composition known before, and
he has added new ones; and if we except the highest lyric,—(in
which how few, how very few even of the greatest minds have
been fortunate)—he has attempted every species successfully;
from the political song of the day, thrown off in the playful
overflow of honest joy and patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad;
47
from epistolary ease and graceful narrative, to austere and
impetuous moral declamation; from the pastoral charms and wild
streaming lights of the Thalaba, in which sentiment and imagery
have given permanence even to the excitement of curiosity; and
from the full blaze of the Kehama,—(a gallery of finished pictures
in one splendid fancy piece, in which, notwithstanding, the moral
grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance of the colouring and
the boldness and novelty of the machinery)—to the more sober
beauties of the Madoc; and lastly, from the Madoc to his Roderick,
in which, retaining all his former excellencies of a poet eminently
inventive and picturesque, he has surpassed himself in language
and metre, in the construction of the whole, and in the splendour
of particular passages.
Here then shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased,
like the encomia on tombstones, as they are described with
religious tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy
indeed, but yet with rational deduction. There are men, who
deserve a higher record; men with whose characters it is the
interest of their contemporaries, no less than that of posterity, to
be made acquainted; while it is yet possible for impartial censure,
and even for quick-sighted envy, to cross-examine the tale without
offence to the courtesies of humanity; and while the eulogist,
detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must pay the full penalty of
his baseness in the contempt which brands the convicted flatterer.
Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled by men, who, as I would
fain hope for the honour of human nature, hurled fire-brands
against a figure of their own imagination; publicly have his talents
been depreciated, his principles denounced; as publicly do I
therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to
leave recorded, that it is Southey's almost unexampled felicity, to
48
possess the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their
characteristic defects. To those who remember the state of our
public schools and universities some twenty years past, it will
appear no ordinary praise in any man to have passed from
innocence into virtue, not only free from all vicious habit, but
unstained by one act of intemperance, or the degradations akin to
intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and habitual
demeanour, which in his early manhood, and first controversial
writings, Milton, claiming the privilege of self-defence, asserts of
himself, and challenges his calumniators to disprove; this will his
school-mates, his fellow-collegians, and his maturer friends, with
a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of their knowledge,
bear witness to, as again realized in the life of Robert Southey. But
still more striking to those, who by biography or by their own
experience are familiar with the general habits of genius, will
appear the poet's matchless industry and perseverance in his
pursuits; the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; his
generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or such as his
genius alone could make otherwise; and that having thus more
than satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet
have made for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in
more various departments, than almost any other writer has done,
though employed wholly on subjects of his own choice and
ambition. But as Southey possesses, and is not possessed by, his
genius, even so is he master even of his virtues. The regular and
methodical tenor of his daily labours, which would be deemed
rare in the most mechanical pursuits, and might be envied by the
mere man of business, loses all semblance of formality in the
dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring and healthful
cheerfulness of his spirits. Always employed, his friends find him
always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than steadfast in the
49
performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small
pains and discomforts which irregular men scatter about them,
and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles
both to happiness and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all
the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around
him or connected with him, which perfect consistency, and (if
such a word might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small
as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this too
is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. I
know few men who so well deserve the character which an antient
attributes to Marcus Cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, in as
much as he seemed to act aright, not in obedience to any law or
outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy nature, which
could not act otherwise. As son, brother, husband, father, master,
friend, he moves with firm yet light steps, alike unostentatious,
and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has uniformly made his
talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public
virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of
pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and of
national illumination. When future critics shall weigh out his
guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the poet only,
that will supply them with the scanty materials for the latter. They
will likewise not fail to record, that as no man was ever a more
constant friend, never had poet more friends and honourers
among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education,
quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies.
[17]
50
CHAPTER IV
The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface—Mr. Wordsworth's earlier
poems—On fancy and imagination—The investigation of the
distinction important to the Fine Arts.
I have wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to
myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted
me from the main road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will
warmly sympathize with them. At present it will be sufficient for
my purpose, if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's writings no more
than my own furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a
new school of poetry, and to the clamours against its supposed
founders and proselytes.
As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were
in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so
entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me
in the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would
have precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard
this declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has
taken it up, as he would have done any other collection of poems
purporting to derive their subjects or interests from the incidents
of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of
meditation which the poet utters in his own person and character;
with the proviso, that these poems were perused without
knowledge of, or reference to, the author's peculiar opinions, and
that the reader had not had his attention previously directed to
those peculiarities. In that case, as actually happened with Mr.
Southey's earlier works, the lines and passages which might have
offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere
51
inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity of
judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives chiefly
in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the
highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners
conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those
who, reading but little poetry, are most stimulated with that
species of it, which seems most distant from prose, would
probably have passed by the volumes altogether. Others more
catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to be most pleased when
most excited, would have contented themselves with deciding,
that the author had been successful in proportion to the elevation
of his style and subject. Not a few, perhaps, might, by their
admiration of the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, on revisiting
the Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old Cumberland
Beggar, and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with kindred
feeling The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other
poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle
place between those written in the highest and those in the
humblest style; as for instance between the Tintern Abbey, and
The Thorn, or Simon Lee. Should their taste submit to no further
change, and still remain unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or
the imitations of them, that are, more or less, scattered through
the class last mentioned; yet even from the small number of the
latter, they would have deemed them but an inconsiderable
subtraction from the merit of the whole work; or, what is
sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, as
serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently the
proper direction of the author's genius.
In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the
Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of
52
the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings
have been since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in
the poems themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the
rejection of the theory. What in and for themselves would have
been either forgotten or forgiven as imperfections, or at least
comparative failures, provoked direct hostility when announced
as intentional, as the result of choice after full deliberation. Thus
the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined with those which
had pleased the far greater number, though they formed twothirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right
they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader
judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind
and fuel to the animosity against both the poems and the poet. In
all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the
mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author possessed both
genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very positive,—but yet
were not quite certain that he might not be in the right, and they
themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind, which seeks
alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by
wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long
and argumentative essay to persuade them, that
Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring
without judgment, and were now about to censure without reason.
[18]
That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to
believe from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own
knowledge, that the same general censure has been grounded by
almost every different person on some different poem. Among
those, whose candour and judgment I estimate highly, I distinctly
remember six who expressed their objections to the Lyrical
53
Ballads almost in the same words, and altogether to the same
purport, at the same time admitting, that several of the poems had
given them great pleasure; and, strange as it might seem, the
composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as his
favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the
same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was
made in the well known story of the picture, the result would have
been the same; the parts which had been covered by black spots
on the one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on the
succeeding.
However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the
attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much
aversion, as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole
work, instead of passing them over in silence, as so much blank
paper, or leaves of a bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one
pretended to have found in them any immorality or indelicacy;
and the poems, therefore, at the worst, could only be regarded as
so many light or inferior coins in a rouleau of gold, not as so much
alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend whose talents I hold in the
highest respect, but whose judgment and strong sound sense I
have had almost continued occasion to revere, making the usual
complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects of Mr.
Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were some few
of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a
sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I
mentioned Alice Fell as an instance; "Nay," replied my friend with
more than usual quickness of manner, "I cannot agree with you
there!—that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing
poem." In the Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience does not enable
me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two
54
subsequent volumes,) I have heard at different times, and from
different individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated,
with the exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before
observed, seem to have won universal praise. This fact of itself
would have made me diffident in my censures, had not a still
stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the
heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of
the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia
vitia of Cowley, Marine, or Darwin might reasonably be thought
capable of corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and
require a twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in order to
dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. But
that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity,
prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases,
and a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations
and characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a
company of almost religious admirers, and this too among young
men of ardent minds, liberal education, and not
———with academic laurels unbestowed;
and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is
characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years
have well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only,
butt of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is
indeed matter of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest
should still continue as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus
and the frogs in Aristophanes; when the former descended to the
realms of the departed to bring back the spirit of old and genuine
poesy;—
CH.
D.
Brekekekex, koax, koax.
All' exoloisth' auto koax.
Ouden gar est' all', hae koax.
Oimozet' ou gar moi melei.
55
CH.
D.
CH.
D.
CH.
Alla maen kekraxomestha
g', oposon hae pharynx an haemon
chandanae di' haemeras,
brekekekex, koax, koax!
Touto gar ou nikaesete.
Oude men haemas su pantos.
Oude maen humeis ge dae m'
oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,
kan me deae, di' haemeras,
eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!
Brekekekex, KO'AX, KOAX!
During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I
became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication
entitled Descriptive Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the
emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon
more evidently announced. In the form, style, and manner of the
whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and
periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and
combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall
those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms
rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich
fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong,
but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient
strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting
in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands always a
greater closeness of attention, than poetry,—at all events, than
descriptive poetry—has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore
justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract I have
sometimes fancied, that I saw an emblem of the poem itself, and
of the author's genius as it was then displayed.—
'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight
Dark is the region as with coming night;
Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
56
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.
The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes
as many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it
is remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the
faults and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its
earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent,
because as heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary
use, they constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are
carried off. Or we may compare them to some diseases, which
must work on the humours, and be thrown out on the surface, in
order to secure the patient from their future recurrence. I was in
my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing Mr.
Wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly
forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of
a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which
the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of The Female
Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the Lyrical
Ballads. There was here no mark of strained thought, or forced
diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery; and, as the poet hath
himself well described in his Lines on revisiting the Wye, manly
reflection and human associations had given both variety, and an
additional interest to natural objects, which, in the passion and
appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to need
nor permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an
imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had
57
almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of
arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic,
which hold so distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary
poetry, and will, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest
genius, unless the attention has been specially directed to their
worthlessness and incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything
particular in the mere style of the poem alluded to during its
recitation, except indeed such difference as was not separable
from the thought and manner; and the Spenserian stanza, which
always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind Spenser's own
style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then opinion, a
more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than could
without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It
was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to
common defects, or to those more properly his own, which made
so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and
subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep feeling
with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing,
with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the objects observed;
and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the
atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world
around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common
view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the
sparkle and the dew drops.
This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more
or less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his
mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated
meditations led me first to suspect,—(and a more intimate
analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks,
functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full
58
conviction,)—that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and
widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the
general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest,
the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I
own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek
phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in
all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective,
unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize
[22] those words originally of the same meaning, which the
conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages,
as the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with
accidents of translation from original works of different countries,
occasion in mixed languages like our own. The first and most
important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly
distinct are confused under one and the same word, and—this
done—to appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning,
and the synonyme, should there be one, to the other. But if,—(as
will be often the case in the arts and sciences,)—no synonyme
exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present
instance the appropriation has already begun, and been
legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly
imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties
generally different, the nomenclature would be at once
determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton,
we should confine the term 'imagination;' while the other would
be contra-distinguished as 'fancy.' Now were it once fully
ascertained, that this division is no less grounded in nature than
that of delirium from mania, or Otway's
Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,
from Shakespeare's
59
What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?
or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of
the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive
some additional and important light. It would in its immediate
effects furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and
ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon
changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the
discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive
in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to
imitate without loss of originality.
It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology
have long been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and
to be vain of it, are so commonly found together, that they pass
almost for the same. I trust therefore, that there will be more good
humour than contempt, in the smile with which the reader
chastises my self-complacency, if I confess myself uncertain,
whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to
myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit,
that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time,
certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the belief
that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out
the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and
analyzed the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr.
W. Taylor's recent volume of synonymes I have not yet seen [23];
but his specification of the terms in question has been clearly
shown to be both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth
in the Preface added to the late collection of his Poems. The
explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given, will be
found to differ from mine, chiefly, perhaps as our objects are
different. It could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the
advantage I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him on a
60
subject to which a poem of his own first directed my attention,
and my conclusions concerning which he had made more lucid to
myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation of
natural objects on the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose
to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are
manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude
their diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the
seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree.
My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their
poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far
as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked
eye of our common consciousness.
Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to
draw more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical
a miscellany as this can authorize; when in such a work (the
Ecclesiasical Polity) of such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious
author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the
port and dignity of his language,—and though he wrote for men of
learning in a learned age,—saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate
and guard against "complaints of obscurity," as often as he was to
trace his subject "to the highest well-spring and fountain." Which,
(continues he) "because men are not accustomed to, the pains we
take are more needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the
matters we handle, seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow
better acquainted with them) dark and intricate." I would gladly
therefore spare both myself and others this labour, if I knew how
without it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic
creed,—not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as
deductions from established premises conveyed in such a form, as
is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction, or to
61
receive a fundamental confutation. If I may dare once more adopt
the words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we shall seem tedious, are
in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare
that labour, which they are not willing to endure." Those at least,
let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to
render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported
the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other
authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well
as to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the
theory which I do acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of
examining the grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments which
I offer in its justification.
62
End of Book Preview
We hope you enjoyed reading this book. This is only preview of
the book with limited chapters available for reading. To download
complete book, become a registered member of PDFBooksWorld
and access our eBooks library with unlimited download of high
quality PDF eBooks. Do share & link to our website through social
networks, blogs and websites.
63